…in French journals such as Cahiers du cinéma. French critics coined the term film noir in reference to the low-keyed lighting used to enhance these dramas stylistically—although the term would not become commonplace in international critical circles until the publication of the book Panorama du film noir americain (1955) by…

…associated with the film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, the publication that popularized the auteur theory in the 1950s. The theory held that certain directors so dominated their films that they were virtually the authors of the film.

Bazin’s influential journal Cahiers du cinéma, founded in 1951, elaborated this notion and became the headquarters of a group of young cinéphiles (“film lovers”)—the critics François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer—who were to become the major directors of the New Wave. Bazin’s basic…

…critics associated with the magazine Cahiers du cinéma (many of whom later would become well-known filmmakers themselves, including François Truffaut and Claude Lelouch) argued that the American commercial film, precisely because its need to please a mass audience had helped it break out of the limiting gentility of the European…

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…the highly influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, with Rivette eventually becoming its editor in chief. Along with another Cahiers du Cinéma writer, Claude Chabrol, the critics became the core directors of the New Wave (French: Nouvelle Vague) film movement, in which the director was seen as auteur and encouraged…

…the monthly avant-garde film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, who incorporated him into the staff. For eight years Truffaut asserted himself as the most truculent critic of the contemporary French cinema, which he considered stale and conventional, and advocated a cinema that would allow the director to write dialogue, invent stories,…